Which Culex mosquito genes are more or less activated during avian malaria parasite invasion?
We performed a first exploratory study trying to answer this question. For that, we used a disease transmission system peculiar to Hawai'i, where avian malaria has been decimating bird populations for decades. Our findings were published in Malaria Journal, an Open Access journal, and can be found here.
What should we do when some fleas bite us? Kill them with absolute ethanol, ID them, extract their DNA, confirm their ID with CSI-like lab techniques, check them for bacteria and spread the word about your findings. I was working in my lab at Rutgers in a very early morning because I was heading out to Chicago to see a friend later in the day. Nobody there. I felt something in my hairy right arm, something like a bite. I ignored it. Then felt it again, and again. Looked at it and thought "crap! Is this what I am thinking it is???". I killed the bug with lab-grade fancy ethanol and checked it under the scope just across my bench. It was a cat flea! I've seen and treated dogs and cats completely covered with fleas in Brazil, but I've never been attacked by them (I've never been attacked by dogs and cats either). Anyway, I went home and took some pictures of the flea bites and, of course, I used a quarter dollar coin to show how huge the bite marks were. See our paper describing this flea attack.